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No, Thune didn't block Schiff from committees over Russia investigation | Fact check

Chris Mueller   Paste BN
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The claim: John Thune blocked Adam Schiff's committee assignments over Russia investigation

A Jan. 11 Threads post (direct link, archive link) claims a newly elected senator has been singled out because of his past work investigating President-elect Donald Trump.

It reads, “BREAKING: Do you agree with Senator Thune’s decision to block Adam Schiff from committee positions until his involvement in the Russia collusion investigation is thoroughly examined? YES or NO?”

The post was liked more than 1,000 times in three days. Similar posts were shared on X.

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Our rating: False

There is no evidence Senate Majority Leader John Thune blocked Sen. Adam Schiff from any committee assignments. Schiff is listed as a member of four Senate committees, and a spokesperson for Schiff said the claim is false.

Schiff assigned to four different Senate committees

Schiff, a Democrat from California, was elected to the U.S. Senate in November, winning the seat once held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The 12-term congressman came to the national spotlight after he led the first impeachment effort against then-President Donald Trump in 2019. Prior to that, Schiff adamantly claimed that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

He was the top Democrat on a Republican-led House committee that investigated that claim and found there was no collusion, as Paste BN previously reported. Schiff said at the time that “Republicans chose not to seriously investigate – or even see when in plain sight – evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

The Republican-led House voted to censure Schiff for that allegation of collusion several years later, in 2023. Schiff had served as the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but Republicans blocked him from that panel after taking back the majority that same year.

However, there is no evidence that Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, blocked Schiff from serving on any Senate committees, as the post claims.

“This is false,” Marisol Samayoa, a spokesperson for Schiff, told Paste BN. 

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The committee assignment process in the Senate technically involves the entire body, but “in practice each party conference is largely responsible for determining which of its members will sit on each committee,” the Senate website says.

“Each party makes its selections, and those are approved through resolutions introduced by each party,” said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The Senate Democrats' committee assignments were approved Jan. 7 by unanimous consent, with Schiff listed as a member of four committees – agriculture, environment, judiciary and small business. Schiff said in a Jan. 2 X post that he was assigned to those committees, and his name appears alongside them on the Senate website and in a Jan. 2 Senate Democrats news release.

Thune released committee assignments for Senate Republicans in late December, but Schiff is not mentioned in any of his recent news releases or social media posts.

A parody account on X posted the same claim on Dec. 15, 2024. The Threads post is an example of what could be called "stolen satire," where claims written as satire and presented that way originally are reposted in a way that makes them appear to be legitimate news. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, as was the case here.

Paste BN reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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